‘What you put forward, Mark, is quite true. Only last week I was watching a programme of Lord Widmerpool’s dealing with protest, counterculture, alternative societies, all the things that he is now interested in. That does not entirely meet our problem, which is a rather more delicate one. The fact is that Lord Widmerpool acts as one of the trustees of the fund from which the Magnus Donners Memorial Prize derives.’
This piece of information naturally made a considerable impression. None of the committee came out with an immediate response. My own first thought was how on earth Widmerpool could have come to occupy such a position in relation to this literary prize, or any other. He might be planning to write a book, but, after all, he had been talking of doing that from his earliest days. More than this was needed as explanation. Who could have been insane enough to have made him trustee of the Magnus Donners Prize? Then, when Delavacquerie continued, the reason became plain.
‘Lord Widmerpool, in his early business life, was for quite a long time associated with Donners-Brebner. He did many miscellaneous jobs for Sir Magnus himself. At one time he might almost have been called Sir Magnus’s right-hand man, so I’ve been told, though I’ve never known Lord Widmerpool personally, only seen him at meetings.’
‘The term jackal has been used,’ said Members.
Delavacquerie ignored the comment. He was always determined that the formalities should be observed.
‘Putting in work on organizing this fund for the Donners-Brebner Fellowships was one of the tasks allotted. In that capacity, as benefiting from them myself, I might even be considered in his debt. For some reason when the Prize was, so to speak, detached from the general sum, Lord Widmerpool’s name remained as a trustee.’
Even Members agreed that a ticklish problem was posed. Any hypothetical question of libel sank into the background, compared with the propriety of awarding a substantial monetary prize, administered—at least in theory—by Widmerpool himself, to an author, who had been one of his wife’s lovers, and written the biography of another man, of whom she had also been the mistress. Besides, Gwinnett had not merely been Pamela’s lover, he was considered by some to be at least the indirect cause of her death; even if she herself had chosen that to be so. After quite a long pause, Emily Brightman spoke.
‘I feel dreadfully sure that I am going to vote for Russell getting the Prize, but I do agree that we are faced with a very delicate situation.’
Delavacquerie, who had no doubt given a good deal of thought to the perplexity which he knew would confront the panel, appeared quite prepared for its attitude to be one of irresolution.
‘The first thing to do is for the committee to read the book, decide whether or not you want the Prize to be given to Professor Gwinnett. If you do, I am prepared to take the next step myself. I will approach Lord Widmerpool in person, and ask him where he stands on the matter. It will no doubt be necessary for him to read Death’s-head Swordsman too, before he can make up his mind.’
Members showed uneasiness about that. I felt a little doubtful myself. It seemed going out of the way to meet trouble.
‘But Kenneth Widmerpool may forbid publication. What shall we do then? Why should we be bullied by him? Surely it would be better to leave Widmerpool alone. What can he do?’
Delavacquerie was firm.
‘The question to some extent involves the Company. The directors may not care tuppence what Widmerpool feels in the matter, but they would not wish attention to be drawn to the fact that he is still connected with the Company to that extent, and at the same time objects to publication. I should like to get Lord Widmerpool’s attitude clearly stated, if I have to consult them. His name could be quietly removed. All sorts of things might be done. They can be gone into, when we know his own views. To remove his name right away, for instance, might induce trouble, rather than curtail it.’
That sounded reasonable. Members withdrew his objection. What had worried him, he said, was thought that the award could turn on Widmerpool’s whim. In other respects, the idea that the committee’s choice might cause a stir greatly pleased Members, who always enjoyed conflict.
‘This is a courageous offer, Gibson,’ said Emily Brightman.
Delavacquerie laughed.
‘In not knowing Lord Widmerpool personally, I have the advantage of ignorance. That is sometimes a useful weapon. I am perhaps not so foolhardy as you all seem to think. There are aspects of the Trapnel story with which, in his latest frame of mind, Lord Widmerpool might even welcome association. I mean Trapnel the despised and rejected—insomuch as Trapnel was despised and rejected.’
I felt confidence in Delavacquerie’s judgment, and could grasp some of what he meant. Nevertheless his train of thought was not wholly clear.
‘But even the new Widmerpool will hardly stomach such an association with Gwinnett, will he?’
‘We’ll see. I may be wrong. It’s worth a try.’
Delavacquerie was giving nothing away at this stage. During what remained of the meeting no matter of consequence was discussed. Death’s-head Swordsman had first to be read. That was the next step. Luncheon came to an end. Emily Brightman said she was on her way to the British Museum. Members was going to his hairdresser, before attending another literary prize committee later that afternoon. After saying goodbye to the others, Delavacquerie and I set off for Fleet Street.
‘How do you propose to tackle Widmerpool?’
Delavacquerie’s manner changed a little from its carefully screened air employed at the table.
‘Tell me, Nicholas, did not Pamela Widmerpool take an overdose that she might be available to the necrophilic professor?’
‘That was how things looked at the time. She may have decided to do herself in anyway.’
‘But it might be said that Gwinnett—by, perhaps only indirectly, being the cause of her end—avenged Trapnel for destruction of his novel, and consequent downfall?’
‘You could look at it that way.’
‘In a sense Gwinnett represents Widmerpool’s revenge on Pamela too?’
‘That also occurred to me. The Revenger’s Tragedy. All the same, the point is surely not going to be easy to put, as man-to-man, when you confront Widmerpool?’
‘Nevertheless, I shall bear it in mind.’
‘I never thought Gwinnett would get the book finished. He gave up academic life when all the trouble happened. I last heard of him teaching water-skiing.’
‘A promising profession for a man keen on Death?’
‘I don’t think Gwinnett does away with his girls. He is not a murderer. He just loves where Death is. The subject enraptures him. Emily Brightman says there was an earlier incident of his breaking into a mortuary, where a dead love of his lay.’
Delavacquerie thought for a moment.
‘I can understand the obsession, like most others. People love where Beauty is, where Money is, where Power is—why not where Death is? An American poet said Death is the Mother of Beauty. No, I was being perhaps unduly secretive at lunch. I’ll tell you. I have a special line on Lord Widmerpool. My son is at the university of which he is the chancellor.’
I knew Delavacquerie’s wife had died ten or fifteen years before. I had never met her. They had come across each other in England, the marriage, so far as I knew, a happy one. Delavacquerie sometimes spoke of his wife. The son he had never before mentioned.
‘In the ordinary way, of course, Etienne would scarcely know who was the chancellor of the university. Lord Widmerpool, as we were saying at lunch, has for some little time been laying stress on his own closeness to the younger generation, and its upheavals. You may have seen his letters—always signed nowadays “Ken Widmerpool”, rather than just “Widmerpool”, as a peer of the realm—a matey approach habitually brought into play so far as students of the university are concerned. He has made his house a centre for what might be called the more difficult cases.’
‘Was your son involved in the Quiggin twins’ paint-throwing? ’
&n
bsp; Delavacquerie laughed at the suggestion.
‘On the contrary, Etienne is a hard-working boy, who wants to get a good economics degree, but naturally he does the things his own contemporaries do up to a point—knows all about them, I mean, even if he isn’t the paint-throwing type. He has talked a lot about Lord Widmerpool. Quite a personality cult has been established there. Lord Widmerpool has made himself a powerful figure in the student world—which, I need hardly remind you, is by no means entirely made up of students.’
‘You think your knowledge of Widmerpool’s latest stance is such as to persuade him to create no difficulties about Gwinnett’s book?’
‘It is my own self-esteem that prompts me to attempt this. That is what I am like. I want to come back to the Magnus Donners Prize committee, and inform them that Lord Widmerpool is perfectly agreeable to Death’s-head Swordsman receiving the award—that is, if you and the rest of the panel wish the book to be chosen.’
This statement of his own feelings in the matter was very typical of Delavacquerie; to admit ambitions of a kind not necessarily to be expected from a poet, anyway the poet of popular imagination. By the time we had this conversation the habit had grown up of our lunching together in London at fairly regular intervals (quite apart from the Magnus Donners meetings), so that I was already familiar with a side of him that was competitive in a manner he rather liked to emphasize. Then he came out with something for which I was not at all prepared.
‘Isn’t a girl called Fiona Cutts some sort of a relation of yours?’
‘A niece.’
‘She used to be a friend of Etienne’s.’
‘Lately?’
‘A year or two ago. For a short time she and Etienne saw quite a lot of each other—I mean enough for me to have met her too. A nice girl. I think in the end she found Etienne too humdrum, though they got on well for a while.’
‘Did they meet with the odd crowd Fiona is now going round with?’
‘No, not at all. At some musical get-together, I think. The thing broke up when this other business started.’
Fiona’s friendship with Etienne Delavacquerie had never percolated down through the family grapevine. There was no particular reason why it should. Even Fiona’s parents were unlikely to keep track of all their daughter’s current boyfriends. It was a pity Susan and Roddy Cutts had never known about this apparently reliable young man. They would have felt relieved, anyway for a short period of time. Delavacquerie, also regretting the termination of the relationship, was probably in ignorance of the extent to which Fiona could show herself a handful. I asked if he knew about Scorpio Murtlock.
‘I knew she was now mixed up with some mystic cult. I didn’t know Murtlock had anything to do with her. I thought he was a queer.’
‘Hard to say.’
‘All I know about Murtlock is that Quentin Shuckerly picked him up somewhere ages ago. Shuckerly, expecting an easy lay, put Murtlock up in his flat. Shuckerly can be quite tough in such matters—that former intellectual black boyfriend of his used to call him the Narcissus of the Nigger—but his toughness, or his narcissism, didn’t stand up to Murtlock’s. Shuckerly had to leave the country to get Murtlock out of his flat. A new book of Shuckerly poems was held up in publication in consequence. I wouldn’t have thought Murtlock a wise young man to get mixed up with. Etienne never told me that.’
Delavacquerie looked quite disturbed. Here our ways had to part.
‘I should like to bug your conversation with Widmerpool, anyway your opening gambit.’
Delavacquerie made a dramatic gesture.
‘I shall take the bull by the horns—adopt the directness of the CIA man and the Cuban defector.’
‘What was that?’
‘He asked him a question.’
‘Which was?’
‘You know how it is in Havana in the Early Warning?’
Delavacquerie waved goodbye. I went on towards the paper, to get a book for review. In the anxiety he had shown about his son’s abandoned love affair—and Fiona’s own involvement with Murtlock—Delavacquerie had displayed more feeling than he usually revealed. It suggested that Etienne Delavacquerie had been fairly hard hit when Fiona went off. I was interested that Delavacquerie himself had met her, and would have liked to hear more of his views on that subject. There had been no opportunity. In any case the friendships of later life, in contrast with those negotiated before thirty, are apt to be burdened with reservations, constraints, inhibitions. Probably thirty was placing the watershed too late for the age when both parties begin more or less to know (at least think they know) what the other is talking about; as opposed to those earlier friendships—not unlike love affairs, with all sexual element removed—which can exist with scarcely an interest in common, mutual misunderstanding of character and motive all but absolute.
In earlier days, given our comparative intellectual intimacy, there would have been no embarrassment in enquiring about Delavacquerie’s own sexual arrangements. The question would have been an aspect of being friends. In fact, Delavacquerie himself would almost certainly have issued some sort of statement of his own on the matter, a handout likely to have been given early priority, when we were first getting to know one another. That was why the rumoured brush with Matilda remained altogether blurred in outline. There was no doubt that Delavacquerie liked women, got on well with them. His poetry showed that. If he possessed any steady company—hard to believe he did not—the lady herself never seemed to appear with him in public.
Thinking of the information now accumulating about Scorpio Murtlock, an incident that had taken place a few years before came to mind. It might or might not be Murtlock this time, the principle was the same. The occasion also marked the last time I had set eyes on an old acquaintance, Sunny Farebrother. I was in London only for the day. Entering a comparatively empty compartment on a tube train, I saw Farebrother sitting at the far end. Wearing a black overcoat and bowler hat, both ancient as his wartime uniforms, he was as usual holding himself very upright. He did not look like a man verging on eighty. White moustache neatly trimmed, he could have passed for middle sixties. In one sense a figure conspicuously of the past in turnout, there was also something about him that was extremely up-to-date, not to say brisk. He was smiling to himself. I took the vacant seat next to him.
‘Hullo, Sunny.’
Farebrother’s face at once lost its smile. Instead, it assumed an expression of rueful compassion. It was the face he had put on when Widmerpool, then a major on the staff, seemed likely to be sacked from Divisional Headquarters. Farebrother, an old enemy, had dropped in to announce that fact.
‘Nicholas, how splendid to meet again after all these years. You find me on my way back from a sad occasion. I am returning from Kensal Green Cemetery. The last tribute to an old friend. One of these fellows I’d known for a mighty long time. Life will never be quite the same again without him. We didn’t always hit it off together—but, my goodness, Nicholas, he was someone known to you too. I’ve just been to Jimmy Stripling’s funeral. Poor old Jimmy. You must remember him. You and I stayed at the Tempiers’, a hundred years ago, when Jimmy was there. He was the old man’s son-in-law in those days. Tall chap, hair parted in the middle, keen on motor-racing. I always remember how Jimmy, and some of the rest of the house-party, tried to play a trick on me, after we’d come back from a ball, and I had gone up to bed. Poor old Jimmy hoped to put a po in my hatbox. I was too sharp for him.’
Farebrother shook his head in sadness at the folly of human nature, folly so abjectly displayed by Jimmy Stripling in hoping to outwit Farebrother in a matter of that sort. I saw now that a black tie added to the sombre note struck by the rest of his clothes.
‘Jimmy and I used to do a lot of business together in our early City days. He always pretended we didn’t get on well. Then, poor old boy, he gave up the City—he was in Lloyd’s, hadn’t done too badly there, and elsewhere—gave up his motor-racing, got a divorce from Peter Templer’s sister, and began m
ixing himself up with all sorts of strange goings-on that couldn’t have been at all good for the nerves. Old Jimmy was a highly strung beggar in his way. Took up with a strange lady, who told fortunes. Occultism, all that. Not a good thing. Bad thing, in fact. The last time I saw him, only a few years ago, he was driving along Piccadilly in a car that could have been fifty years old, if it was a day. Jimmy must have lost all his money. His cars were once his pride and joy. Always had the latest model before anyone else. Now he was grinding along in this old crock. I could have wept at seeing Jimmy reduced to an old tin can like that.’
Farebrother, a habit of his when he told almost any story, suddenly lowered his voice, at the same time looking round to see if we were likely to be overheard, though no one else was sitting at our end of the compartment.
‘It was even worse than that, I fear. There weren’t many at the funeral but those who were looked a rum lot, to say the least. I got into conversation with one of the few mourners who was respectably dressed. Turned out he was a member of Lloyd’s, like Jimmy, though he hadn’t seen him for a long time. Do you know what had happened? When that fortune-telling lady of Jimmy’s was gathered in, he took up with a boy. Would you have believed it? Jimmy may have behaved like a crackpot at times, but no one ever guessed he had those tastes. This bloke I talked to told me he’d heard that a lot of undesirables used to live off Jimmy towards the end. I don’t think he’d have invented the tale on account of the funny types at the funeral. Jimmy’s boy was there. In fact he was more or less running the show. He wore a sort of coloured robe, hair not much short of his shoulders. Good-looking lad in his way, if you’d cleaned him up a bit. Funnily enough, I didn’t at all take against him, little as I’m drawn to that type as a rule. Even something I rather liked, if you can believe that. He had an air of efficiency. That always gets me. It was a cremation, and this young fellow showed himself perfectly capable of taking charge. All these strange types in their robes sang a sort of dirge for Jimmy at the close of the proceedings.’
Dance to the Music of Time, Volume 4 Page 58